A BYTE OF KNOWLEDGE
The last issue of The Waynedale News was a pretty good one. In fact it was a great issue. Since Bob Stark has owned the paper many readers have commented on how much The Waynedale News has improved and grown over the past few years.
It is my belief that the paper wouldn’t be what it is without the help of The Waynedale News Staff. Each person gives the best that he or she can give to the paper, sometimes without sleep or food or by no other means than the will to just get the paper done. But we almost didn’t have our last issue. It wasn’t a person, it was “The Computer!” For some reason The Computer didn’t want this issue to come out like the rest. It wanted to be stubborn. So with some suggestive words by me and the rest of the staff; it still wouldn’t work for us. To be more technical, the internal hard drive of the computer would no longer read and write to the disc. Without an internal hard drive we wouldn’t have the applications to put the paper together. The documents that the paper uses are safely stored on an external hard drive, which was working fine.
With an internal hard drive failing and an external hard drive working there was only one way to work on the paper. And that was to make the external hard drive run the computer. The external hard drive is connect via “Firewire” it’s a little wire that you can plug several hard drives to one computer including video cameras and audio equipment. But through a simple command on The Computer, it was able to start up on a back system located on the external hard drive. With a little configuration and a few bugs to fix, we had a computer working without an internal hard drive. From the outside no one would have known what was going on. Everything looked the same. But things were very different.
Since the last paper has come out we’ve installed a new internal hard drive, cleaned up a mess from the old, and have plenty of space for more articles, ads and photos.
But what seemed like a difficult problem to get through, it was actually easy. Perhaps the smartest thing we did was to buy a Mac. With a Windows system, starting up from an external hard drive is possible, but only if you install an operating system on it. Which I checked isn’t a fast and easy process to do, I would rather watch grass grow than sit behind a computer and install a windows operating system. On a Mac, it’s like copying one folder from one hard drive to another, and the system is installed. If what happened last issue would have been on a Windows machine; it would have been unrecoverable, and the paper would have been very late in getting to you, or it might have never come at all.
Lucky? No I don’t believe in that when it comes to computers. We were just smart to buy a Macintosh G4. What seemed like a big ordeal, really gave us 3-4 hours downtime, instead of 3-4 days if we had a computer made by someone else. Thank you Apple Computer.
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